July 6, 2015

It’s the year 2030. A fleet of driverless taxis roams throughout your city, ready to pick you up and take you to your destination at a moment’s notice. As a result, greenhouse gases are now 63 to 82 percent lower than with a privately owned hybrid car and 90 percent lower than a 2014 gasoline-powered private vehicle. …

Those numbers are from a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory… read more

First the galaxies are destroyed. Then the solar system breaks apart and the Earth explodes. Finally, the atoms themselves are ripped apart.

July 3, 2015

Vanderbilt University mathematicians have come up with a new theory of “cosmological viscosity” (how sticky the universe is) that challenges current theories.

For decades, cosmologists have had trouble reconciling the classic notion of viscosity based on the laws of thermodynamics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, according the the team, which has now come up with a fundamentally new mathematical formulation of the problem that appears to… read more

July 3, 2015

A University of Texas at Arlington materials science and engineering team has developed a new “photoelectrochemical” energy cell that can efficiently store solar energy and deliver electrical power 24 hours a day. It can also be scaled up to provide large amounts of energy, limited only by the size of its chemical storage tanks, according to Fuqiang Liu, an assistant professor in the Materials… read more

July 3, 2015

The molecules that maintain long-term memories in mice are a normal version of prion* proteins and work the same way as mechanisms in prions that cause mad cow disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans, and other degenerative brain diseases. That’s the conclusion of research from the lab of Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, MD, of… read more

July 2, 2015

A team from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, along with collaborators from the University of Tokyo and University of Osaka, have successfully produced pairs of spin-entangled electrons and demonstrated, for the first time, that these electrons remain entangled even when they are separated from one another on a chip.

This research could allow information contained in quantum bits (qubits) to be shared between… read more

July 2, 2015

There may be far fewer galaxies further out in the universe then might be expected, according to a new study led by Michigan State University.

Over the years, the Hubble Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to look deep into the universe. The long view stirred theories of untold thousands of distant, faint galaxies. But new research appearing in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal… read more

July 2, 2015

Engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) have invented a way to use silver at room temperature for printed electronics, with broad applications in microelectronics, sensors, energy devices, low emissivity coatings and even transparent displays.

Silver offers advantages in electronic devices because of its conductive and other properties. But the process for using it has required high heat and organic stablizers, followed by post-heating treatments that are required… read more

July 2, 2015

Physicists at the University of Sussex have frozen single ytterbium ions (charged atoms) to within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero (minus 273.15°C), using 12.6 GHz microwave radiation combined with a large static magnetic field gradient. Temperatures near absolute zero are required to hold ions stationary for quantum computing and other applications.

The physicists measured a reduction of almost two orders of magnitude in the… read more

The fruit-fly research findings, published today (July 1) in Nature, suggest that short-range, cell-to-cell communication may rely on this type of direct connection more than was previously understood, said… read more

July 1, 2015

A new study has found quantifiable evidence that supports the common-sense idea that walking in nature could lower your risk of depression.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found that people who walked for 90 minutes in a natural area, as opposed to participants who walked in a high-traffic urban setting (El Camino Real in Palo Alto, California, a noisy street with three to four… read more

Terminator Genisys film will distract from the real issues posed by future AI, says Tegmark

July 1, 2015

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) announced today (July 1) the selection of 37 research teams around the world to which it plans to award about $7 million from Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project for a global research program aimed at keeping AI beneficial to humanity.

June 30, 2015

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new approach for forming 3D shapes from flat, 2D sheets of graphene, paving the way for future integrated systems of graphene-MEMS hybrid devices and flexible electronics.

Reported methods of using graphene transfer have been mostly limited to planar or curvilinear surfaces due to the challenges associated with fractures from local stress during transfer onto… read more

June 30, 2015

Rice University has installed the Titan Themis scanning/transmission electron microscope, which will enable scientists from Rice as well as academic and industrial partners to view and analyze materials at angstrom-scale (one-tenth of a nanometer) resolution, about the size of a single hydrogen atom.

Images will be captured with a variety of detectors, including X-ray, optical and multiple electron detectors and a 4K-resolution camera (will create 4K ultra… read more

June 30, 2015

Swarms of microscopic, magnetic, robotic beads could be used within five years by vascular surgeons to clear blocked arteries. These minimally invasive microrobots, which look and move like corkscrew-shaped bacteria, are being developed by an $18-million, 11-institution research initiative headed by the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technologies (KEIT).

These “microswimmers” are driven and controlled by external magnetic fields, similar to how nanowires from … read more